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Offline Bitter

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Goodbye to my American dream
« on: July 17, 2013, 01:27:46 PM »
Goodbye to my American dream
My mom moved us here for a better life. But as a black woman, I'm tired of loving a country that can't love me back
BY TIFFANIE DRAYTON
http://www.salon.com/2013/07/16/goodbye_to_my_american_dream/


A photo of the author

On the day of college graduation, I told my friends and family the news: I was leaving the country I had lived in since childhood.

“I just need a change,” I told them, but they knew there was more. Was it some romance gone awry, they wondered? Some impulsive response to a broken heart? And I was running from heartbreak. My relationship with the United States of America is the most tumultuous relationship I have ever had, and it ended with the heart-rending realization that a country I loved and believed in did not love me back.

Back in the ’90s, my mother brought me from our home in the Caribbean islands to the U.S., along with my brother and sister. I was 4 years old. She worked as a live-in nanny for two years, playing mommy for white kids whose parents had better things to do. She took trips to the Hamptons and even flew on a private jet to California as “the help.” My mom didn’t believe that nanny meant maid, but she did whatever was asked of her, because she was thirsty. She had a thirst that could only be quenched by the American dream. One day, she thought, her children would be educated. One day, they might have nannies of their own.

That was our path. Get a “good education.” When the neighborhoods with quality schools became too expensive for my mom to afford as a single parent with three kids, we traversed the United States with GreatSchools.net as our compass. New Jersey, elementary school: decent, mostly Hispanic school, even though my gifted and talented program was predominantly Indian. Texas, middle school: “Found a great school for you guys,” my mom said while rain poured into our car through the open windows where the straps of our mattresses were tied down. It had an “A” grade and was 70 percent white. Florida, high school: “Hey, Tiffanie, you should have this egg. It’s the only brown one like you!” my classmate told me during AP biology. Philadelphia, Hawaii, North, South, East, West. Car, U-Haul, Greyhound, plane, train. New York City, private university: “I really want to write an essay on being the gentrifier,” one courageous young man pitched in a journalism class. I was one of only two people who were disturbed.

For a long time I survived by covering myself in the labels I’d accumulated over the years.  I plastered each one to my body with super glue as if they were Post-It note reminders that I was someone.  Sports fanatic (hot pink). Feminist, beautiful, writer, comedian, fashionista, friend (fuchsia, yellow, blue, purple, red, green). I hid behind them; they were my only shields.

‪Green covered my eyes when a childhood friend’s family banged down my front door and demanded their daughter get out of the house full of blacks. Blue protected my heart when my black peers ostracized my enjoyment of complete, complex sentences. Yellow blocked my ears when whispers floated through the air at my ex-white-American boyfriend’s home like haunted ghosts: I can’t believe he is dating a black girl. The words passed like a gentle breeze barely creating flutter.‬

I existed right there on the fringe of ugly, ignorant and uncultured. Black but not black enough for my positive attributes to be justified. “Where are you from?” potential dates asked when they met me. “I am from Trinidad and Tobago,” I said. “Oh, that’s why you are so beautiful and exotic — I knew you couldn’t be all black.”

“Black people don’t really  know how to swim,” my co-worker once told me when I worked as a swim instructor at my neighborhood’s pool. “What about me?” I asked. “Oh, you aren’t black. You’re from Trinidad,” she said.

“The black children don’t like to read very much,” I overheard one librarian discussing with another while I sat down reading a book a couple feet away. They passed right by me with smiles.

I was the model minority — absent, yet present. The yardstick to which other minorities were measured.  If I could finish high school and college, why couldn’t so many African-American people find their way out of their hoods and pull themselves up by their bootstraps? If I could speak English without using a single ebonic slang, why do others call themselves “niggas”? If I managed to make it through 23 years without contracting an STD or getting pregnant, why do black women have the highest statistical risk of disease and teenage motherhood? Daddy America looked to me to prove that he did something right. After all, one of his children turned out all right. The others must simply be problem kids.

I survived because I was never able to make America my home. I never watched my childhood neighborhood become whitened by helicopter lights in search of criminals or hipsters in search of apartments. No state, city or town has been a mother to me, cradling generations of my family near her bosom, to then be destroyed by unemployment or poverty. No school system had the time or opportunity to relegate me to “remedial,” “rejected” or “unteachable.” I never accepted the misogynistic, drug-infested, stripper-glamorizing, hip-hop culture that is force-fed to black youths through square tubes. I am not a product of a state of greatness but a byproduct of emptiness.

In that empty, dark space I found my blackness. I stripped myself of the labels, painfully peeling them off one by one. Beneath them there is a wounded, disfigured colored woman who refuses to be faceless anymore, remain hidden any longer. My face may be repulsive to some since it bears proof that race continues to be a problem.

Still, I count myself lucky. Where my open cuts remain, eventually scars will take their place and those scars will fade with time. For many, their wounds will never heal. Gunshots bore coin-size holes into their chests that will never close. Their chained wrists and ankles will continue to bruise. Their minds have collapsed under the weight of a failed education system.

I was already back in Trinidad and Tobago when the Trayvon Martin verdict came down last week. I wasn’t surprised, but I was speechless. My hope is that it will force Americans to reexamine their “post-racial” beliefs. A friend of mine posted on my Facebook page, “You made the right choice.” I think I did, too.

I have found freedom by leaving the land of the free.

Tiffanie Drayton is a freelance writer and graduate of The New School University. She hopes to one day return to an equal and racially tolerant America.
Bitter is a supercalifragilistic tic-tac-pro

Offline D.H.W

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #1 on: July 17, 2013, 01:49:04 PM »
She could come live with me.
"Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid."
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giggsy11

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #2 on: July 17, 2013, 03:02:00 PM »
She is cute. DHW back off! ;D

Offline just cool

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #3 on: July 17, 2013, 04:44:10 PM »
How is it that allyuh cool with tiffany but allyuh does say i'm angry. im fackin confused here.  :thinking:

BTW nice article, she's 100% right! some of yuhs need to live in a white country to get/understand this.
« Last Edit: July 17, 2013, 06:50:35 PM by just cool »
The pen is mightier than the sword, Africa for Africans home and abroad.Trinidad is not my home just a pit stop, Africa is my destination,final destination the MOST HIGH.

Offline dinho

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #4 on: July 17, 2013, 04:49:15 PM »
How is it that allyuh cool with tiffany but allyuh does say i'm angry. im fackin confused here.  :thinking:

BTW nice article, she's 100% right! some of yuhs need to live in a white country to get this.

Why yuh doh do like Tiffany and come back and live in Trinidad. Come back and find yuh freedom.
         

Offline Toppa

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #5 on: July 17, 2013, 04:51:28 PM »
That article almost read like poetry. :)
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Offline just cool

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #6 on: July 17, 2013, 04:58:50 PM »
How is it that allyuh cool with tiffany but allyuh does say i'm angry. im fackin confused here.  :thinking:

BTW nice article, she's 100% right! some of yuhs need to live in a white country to get this.

Why yuh doh do like Tiffany and come back and live in Trinidad. Come back and find yuh freedom.
And who guh mind meh 10 3 american pickinee, you??
The pen is mightier than the sword, Africa for Africans home and abroad.Trinidad is not my home just a pit stop, Africa is my destination,final destination the MOST HIGH.

Offline vb

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #7 on: July 17, 2013, 06:53:58 PM »
That article almost read like poetry. :)

Nicely written. Hope things work out for her in TT.

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Offline Brownsugar

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #8 on: July 17, 2013, 06:55:40 PM »
She is cute. DHW back off! ;D

I concerned about that fella yuh know.  He have ah kinda stalker finish about him....
"...If yuh clothes tear up
Or yuh shoes burst off,
You could still jump up when music play.
Old lady, young baby, everybody could dingolay...
Dingolay, ay, ay, ay ay,
Dingolay ay, ay, ay..."

RIP Shadow....The legend will live on in music...

Offline D.H.W

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Re: Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #9 on: July 17, 2013, 07:04:08 PM »
She is cute. DHW back off! ;D

I concerned about that fella yuh know.  He have ah kinda stalker finish about him....

Oh lord boy. Brownie how you marking me so? :)

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Offline Bakes

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #10 on: July 17, 2013, 07:13:32 PM »
I wish she luck... leh we see how long she last in de "caribbean islands."

Dumplingdinho

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #11 on: July 17, 2013, 07:40:49 PM »
there are others like her who dont like it but will never leave the country....brave move by her to return to trinidad especially since left at 4.  it might be easier for someone in their late teens to move back since they would have had a network of friends to help restart that aspect of their life

Offline Peong

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #12 on: July 17, 2013, 09:59:12 PM »
Allyuh read the comments?  Those are the kinds of people who make her want to leave.

Offline Bakes

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #13 on: July 18, 2013, 12:44:33 AM »
No one likes a quitter... and she comes across as just that.  The going gets tough... so she gets going, literally.  She was brought to this country and given every opportunity to succeed, took advantage of those opportunities and now that things going ah li'l rough she riding out.  Not only that... the rest ah black people cyah just get up and leave, dem have to fight thru it.  She eh trying to help make things better in whatever way she can, she taking the easy way out.  This is precisely how an American would look at her and if she was a Grenadian who did this in Trinidad the first thing a Trini would'a say is "see... that is why yuh shouldn't let dem ungrateful small islanders in we country in de first place."

Offline Quags

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #14 on: July 18, 2013, 01:44:21 AM »
Her moms plan was kinda cool .Loved her kids big time.

Offline just cool

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #15 on: July 18, 2013, 05:00:47 AM »
No one likes a quitter... and she comes across as just that.  The going gets tough... so she gets going, literally.  She was brought to this country and given every opportunity to succeed, took advantage of those opportunities and now that things going ah li'l rough she riding out.  Not only that... the rest ah black people cyah just get up and leave, dem have to fight thru it.  She eh trying to help make things better in whatever way she can, she taking the easy way out.  This is precisely how an American would look at her and if she was a Grenadian who did this in Trinidad the first thing a Trini would'a say is "see... that is why yuh shouldn't let dem ungrateful small islanders in we country in de first place."
Every body eh have that kinda fortitude bakes.

some ppl have fight and some ppl don't. that's why it have folks who does go nuts under very little pressure, and some who does commit suicide. 

not every body build like that, especially for soldiering.  some are warriors, and some are not, and in the mix are also gardeners, builders and farmers.

take me for instance, i consider my self ah trooper, but now and then i does wonder "what the fack i'm doing here amongst these loveless ppl?"

sometimes i does get the urge to just pick up and run and go live in one ah dem smaller islands where i could sleep with my windows open and leave my car door unlocked and don't have to worry, a reality where ppl live simple laid back lives.

i does often wonder why i can't just go and live on one ah dem greek islands in the middle of the mediterranean, or maybe even little dominica or st kitts and just farm and have ah peace of mind, which my only ambition right now, and all i want out of life in all honesty.

i tired of the rat race! but i have three yutes who need me right now so ah stuck in this jungle for another 15-20 yrs God willing.     :'(
The pen is mightier than the sword, Africa for Africans home and abroad.Trinidad is not my home just a pit stop, Africa is my destination,final destination the MOST HIGH.

Offline 100% Barataria

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #16 on: July 18, 2013, 06:05:43 AM »
Good post JC and BTW, there are diehard fighters who consider making her move everyday, it's not only about allegedly quitting, but seeking what you deem best for your family, albeit that in it of itself isn't necessarily a constant
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Offline fishs

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #17 on: July 18, 2013, 06:08:02 AM »
No one likes a quitter... and she comes across as just that.  The going gets tough... so she gets going, literally.  She was brought to this country and given every opportunity to succeed, took advantage of those opportunities and now that things going ah li'l rough she riding out.  Not only that... the rest ah black people cyah just get up and leave, dem have to fight thru it.  She eh trying to help make things better in whatever way she can, she taking the easy way out.  This is precisely how an American would look at her and if she was a Grenadian who did this in Trinidad the first thing a Trini would'a say is "see... that is why yuh shouldn't let dem ungrateful small islanders in we country in de first place."

Breds she probably looking at the fact that it is her life to live and she just wants to be in a better space.
Other people are born to take on fights maybe she is not. I cannot condenm her for wanting something better and if she's found it in TT then good for her.
Ah want de woman on de bass

Offline kounty

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #18 on: July 18, 2013, 06:57:31 AM »
No one likes a quitter... and she comes across as just that.  The going gets tough... so she gets going, literally. She was brought to this country and given every opportunity to succeed, took advantage of those opportunities and now that things going ah li'l rough she riding out. 

I don't think the going just suddenly became tough. I think she chronicling her Babylon experience which I'm sure a lot of the black Babylonians (from different quarters in the country - urban & rural - could identify with. I could identify with those experiences having moved around this place quite a bit.

  This is precisely how an American would look at her and if she was a Grenadian who did this in Trinidad the first thing a Trini would'a say is "see... that is why yuh shouldn't let dem ungrateful small islanders in we country in de first place."

Being the descendant of a cussin stinkin grenadian grandmother I think we'd (trinidadians) say: "yuh gone? well laterz den!" (*grateful for one less of 'them'*)

Not only that... the rest ah black people cyah just get up and leave, dem have to fight thru it.  She eh trying to help make things better in whatever way she can, she taking the easy way out.
Black people Yad up inna de east!
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I applaud her and wish her all the best!
« Last Edit: July 18, 2013, 07:03:16 AM by kounty »

giggsy11

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #19 on: July 18, 2013, 07:28:29 AM »
Is not like she cannot return; she choose this option because it is available to her. The chile will be able to compare both experiences, and who knows where she will eventually end up. When you are that age and without child, it is easy to make that type of move. It is a move some  have made in the reverse. Bottom line, hope she finds what makes her happy.

giggsy11

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #20 on: July 18, 2013, 07:29:19 AM »
She is cute. DHW back off! ;D

I concerned about that fella yuh know.  He have ah kinda stalker finish about him....

Thursty brotha!  ;D Love you D! ;)

Offline D.H.W

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #21 on: July 18, 2013, 09:00:33 AM »
Lol. I'm a nice fella why alyuh so boy hmmm. :)
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Offline Quags

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #22 on: July 18, 2013, 10:03:14 AM »
« Last Edit: July 18, 2013, 10:23:25 AM by Qmire »

Offline sammy

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #23 on: July 18, 2013, 11:24:09 AM »
She is cute. DHW back off! ;D

i thought u is/was a chick?
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Offline weary1969

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #24 on: July 18, 2013, 11:28:55 AM »
Today you're the dog, tomorrow you're the hydrant - so be good to others - it comes back!"

Offline D.H.W

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #25 on: July 18, 2013, 11:38:32 AM »
 :devil: hehehe
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Offline Cantona007

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #26 on: July 18, 2013, 11:40:33 AM »
She is cute. DHW back off! ;D

i thought u is/was a chick?

 :rotfl:  :rotfl: :laugh:

That young lady is impressive in more ways than one. Good luck to her.
« Last Edit: July 18, 2013, 11:47:24 AM by Cantona007 »
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Offline Andre

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #27 on: July 18, 2013, 11:44:46 AM »
ah wonder how she dealing with all the racism that so pervasive in trinidad.

Offline Bakes

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #28 on: July 18, 2013, 05:25:48 PM »
ah wonder how she dealing with all the racism that so pervasive in trinidad.

Well Trinidad doh really have dem kinda problems... so she should be fine.

Offline fari

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Re: Goodbye to my American dream
« Reply #29 on: July 18, 2013, 09:34:01 PM »
i wonder what kinda work she doing...i had a few pardnas who went home and came back...dey couldn't make, tings moved too slow for them...i would like to hear her thoughts a few months on

 

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